Month: May 2021

Reviews, reviews, reviews. I’ve been posting reviews of this year’s Splatterpunk Award finalists, as you can see elsewhere on this blog, and I’ve also started on the Hugo Awards reviews that’ll be posted at WWAC in due course. Other than that, my novel’s well past its half-way point. I’ve had just the one article published outside of my blog (Wonder Histories, June 1929: Gernsback is Back) but I’ve managed to get plenty of behind-the-scenes work done. And I’m due to enter talks about a very intriguing project later this very week…

Article topics for June and beyond:

This was the month in which it became widespread knowledge that John Steinbeck wrote a werewolf novel. Entitled Murder at Full Moon, it was ejected for publication and 1930 and currently languishes at the University of Texas in Austin, although Professor Gavin Jones of Stanford University is pushing for it to be published. As something of a lycanthropy buff, one aspect that stands out to me is that the novel apparently associates werewolf transformations with the full moon, even though this would not become a genre convention until Universal used it in the films like Werewolf of London (1935) and The Wolf Man (1940). Too bad Lon Chaney Jr is no longer with us to star in a film version: he had experience with both werewolves and Steinbeck adaptations, after all.

This month saw the presentation of the Bram Stoker Awards. The biggest winner was Stephen Graham Jones, who took the novel and long fiction prizes for The Only Good Indians and Night of the Mannequins respectively. EV Knight’s The Fourth Whore won in the first novel category, Kymera Press’ Mary Shelley Presents took the graphic novel award, Adam Cesare’s Clown in a Cornfield was named the best young adult novel, Christina Sng won the poetry award for A Collection of Dreamscapes and the screenplay award went to Leigh Whannell for The Invisible Man.

In the short fiction categories, Josh Malerman’s werewolf tale “One Last Transformation” was named the best short story, while Grotesque: Monster Stories (Lee Murray) and Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women (edited by Lee Murray and Geneve Flynn) were named best collection and best anthology respectively. Finally, the long-form and short-form non-fiction awards both went to Tim Wagonner for his book Writing in the Dark and his essay “Speaking of Horror”.

New films arriving variously in cinemas and on streaming services this month include the torture-themed Antidote; Aquarium of the Dead, in which sea life goes bad; Benny Loves You, in which an abandoned toy seeks revenge; the oddball Dementia Part II; The Devil’s Child, about a nurse who finds herself taking care of a psychic; The Djinn, where wishes go wrong; the South African alien abduction thriller Fried Barry; Ghost Lab, a film from Thailand; The Mad Hatter, set in a mysterious mansion; Morgue, about a security guard facing eerie goings-on in the titular locale; The Woman in the Window, a story of agoraphobia; Oxygen, a story of amnesia and claustrophobia; the school-based Seance; Sound of Violence, about sensory oddities in a very messed-up family; the old-school slasher Skull: The Mask; and the cursed-sibling saga Threshold.

Oh, yes, we also had a round of sequels to big-name films, namely A Quiet Place Pat II, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (not landing in the US until June 4), Spiral: From the Book of Saw and Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead – the last of which, while not strictly speaking a sequel, could be seen as a spiritual successor to that director’s earlier Dawn of the Dead remake. In the world of serialised streaming we received new seasons of Castlevania and Love, Death & Robots plus the Jurassic Park spin-off Camp Cretaceous.

Bidding farewell…

Manga artist Kentaro Miura was best known for Berserk, a sword-and-sorcery saga so brutal that it often bleeds into horror. The manga began serialisation in 1989 but will remain unfinished as a result of Miura succumbing to an acute aortic dissection. He was 54.

I’m still working with my lovely artistic team on Midnight Widows issue 3. As another preview, here’s some of Marcela Hauptvogelova’s artwork in which we meet two new characters…

If you’d like to get hold of the first two issues in PDF form, please place a donation via Ko-Fi or Patreon.

I’m taking a break from my issue-by-issue retrospective of Amazing Stories, but I ain’t slackin’. Over the next few months I’m going to be looking at Hugo Gernsback’s attempts to create rivals to the magazine he lost control of, starting with the June 1929 issue of Science Wonder Stories...

In the first and second parts of my trip through Divided we Fall – an anthology from October 2020 predicting the dystopian results of Joe Biden being elected president – I encountered the Mormon Church being criminalised, conservative military officers being “disappeared” and Donald Trump himself being literally torn apart by a leftist mob. It was pretty boring to be honest, but having passed the halfway mark I may as well soldier on. Here are three more warnings of things to come…

“The Ballad of Becky and Karen” by Jon Del Arroz

To quote a Trump-era tweet from the author of this story, “shitposting works as marketing. This is why we is president now.” True to his philosophy, Jon Del Arroz delivers a few thousand words’ worth of shitpost starring a merry cast of caricatures.

Becky and Karen are two parochial San Francisco white girls who support Black Lives Matter, despite being hopelessly out of touch with the issues connected to the movement. When Karen posts a photo of herself holding up a sign reading “Say their names”, Becky clicks “like” even though she has no idea whose names are being referred to. Since they’re progressives in Divided we Fall, they also spout dialogue like “I can’t believe I just microagressed” and “You should probably watch more mandatory diversity training videos.” Becky has seen Donald Trump murdered on television, and fully approves: her philosophy is that “[n]o matter how micro their aggressions, racists deserved to be put down like animals.”

Noticing that the social media photos of their fellow activists are lacking diversity, the pair decide to head into Oakland and film a video: “All we need is to find some marginalized people to dance with to show we’re one of them and they’re included”, declares Becky. Ignoring a “No Whites Allowed “ sign and heading past the nearly-collapsed remains of the Oakland Tribune building (“Allegedly some kind of bomb had gone off there during the Great Peaceful Protests of 2020”), the two friends stumble upon a group of appropriately marginalised people:

Continue reading “Divided we Fall Part 3: Mr. Kipling’s Exceedingly Banned Books”